Hi Jeremy

Wow that diagram is clever way of illustrating the grep and is very helpful.

I must have got lucky then because when searching for ‘A’ i typed: .+.+\K.*A(?=(?!£)) i placed the A after the asterisk and it seemed to work
but looking at your breakdown it should be: .+.+\KA(?=(?!£))

There are sometimes commas, parentheses in the third tab location for example when searching for A and the third tab can sometimes look like this:

A, B, B, G
B [7, 35]
A, A (Frozen) 

Therefore the grep search skips it but ill try and figure out how to ignore commas etc as i think i’ve asked much of you already. I think my main mental hurdle is completely understanding the various uses of positive and negative lookahead and behind and the sequencing of the expressions but your diagram has helped me get somewhat closer….at times its been like staring at a car engine and having no clue :)

This is something i really want to grips with but unfortunately i don’t have one of those minds that are proficient with formulaic equations so its going to be alot of trial error, i have to admit i had all but given up before your help. I was preparing myself to tediously manually copy and paste each entry.

Thanks for your time and patience Jeremy its greatly appreciated.

Hi Jeremy im back at work. Hope you had a pleasant weekend, thanks for getting back to me. You are correct there is always a ‘£’ in the 5th final tab

I have tried your grep expression and assumed that perhaps the asterisk was a wild card and changed it to ‘H’. . i also messed about with your grep at regxr changing variables but no joy.

Perhaps my example of tabs aren’t really showing well when i paste them into this post message, using the above as an example i will annotate below if it helps?

1ST TAB: SH10
2ND TAB: Advanced Screen for MSM
3RD TAB: FCRU, PCR Swabs x 2, B (need to change variables in this tab, grep required for this line)
4TH TAB: 4 hours (changes sometimes hours, sometimes days)
5TH TAB: £00.00 (always price at the end typically no more than 2 or 3 decimal points i.e £21.00 or £176.00)

Im not sure i fully understand how to implement this grep, just when i seem to think i have some understanding i realise i don’t. Apologies if i’ve over engineered this post.